Manufacturing and industrial processes introduce distortion into workpieces resulting in the workpieces being rejected by quality control inspectors and customers, requiring reworking or resulting in the workpiece being scrapped. Additionally, if not reworked, workpieces distorted beyond tolerances may potentially fail when in use. Scrap is an inefficient outcome for parts, and failure may result in additional losses resulting from the time equipment is offline as a result of the failure, any additional damage caused to other parts and equipment by the failure, and any safety hazards caused by the failure. Furthermore, incremental costs, such as tool and labor costs, rise due to the ultimately unproductive operation of the manufacturing equipment. To prevent failure, manufacturers rely on quality control processes to reject parts outside of tolerances. However, these processes are time-consuming, divorced from the manufacturing process, and may rely on unreliable or inconsistent detection methods.
United States Patent Publication 2014/0007394 (“US '394”), entitled “Method and Compression Apparatus for Introducing Residual Compression into a Component Having a Regular or an Irregular Shaped Surface,” purports to address the problem of component failure from high-stressed areas. US '394 describes an impact tool head used to induce compression in workpieces having an irregular surface. The design of US '394, however, may not effectively detect and evaluate irregularities and is limited in its ability to do so, may not make accurate decisions regarding the corrective force to be applied, and only narrowly addresses distortion through an inefficient correction process using non-selective guidance. Accordingly, there is a need for improved systems, apparatuses, and methods for distortion detection and correction.